Porsche mourns Paul FrèreTribute to a Great Journalist and Racing Driver
Stuttgart. Dr. Ing. h.c. F. Porsche AG, Stuttgart mourns a great journalist and racing driver: Paul Frère has died at the age of 91. Anton Hunger, Porsche’s Head of Press and Public Relations, paid tribute to the deceased: “Paul Frère lived life at racing speed. Whether as an engineer, a race driver or a journalist, he was a man who commanded the widespread admiration of the international motoring scene. With his passing, Porsche loses a connoisseur of many years, who actively accompanied the enterprise and its products from their beginnings right up to the present day.”
A Belgian citizen, Paul Frère was born in 1917 in the French town of
Le Havre. He made his way into motor sport in the late 1940s and subsequently drove for various different teams. He started for the first time for Porsche in 1953 with Richard von Frankenberg in a Porsche 550 Spyder at Le Mans, where he gained a best of class victory. In the 1958 Le Mans, together with Edgar Barth in a Porsche 718 RSK, he finished in fourth place overall, besides winning best of class in the category up to 1500 cubic centimeters.
In parallel to his career as a racing driver, in 1945 he began a career in freelance journalism and was much in demand as an expert worldwide. Paul Frère continued his activities as a journalist and test driver to a ripe old age and wrote various books on automobiles, including the “Porsche 911 Story”, a standard work which is in print to this day. An enthusiastic aficionado of the sports cars from Zuffenhausen, he was still driving his first Porsche – a 356 – as well as an Indian red 911 Carrera in the last years of his life.
GO
25.02.2008